CCC Online as Teleidoscope

Inside Higher Ed is runningCollin’s piece
today about CCC Online called
"Mirror, Mirror on the Web." The column puts a
beam on CCC Online
and introduces a few of the features of the site, but beyond that–and more
importantly, I’d say–it makes explicit some of the ways blog-based thinking
influenced the creation of the site. As the article makes plain, the three
of us working on the project are active bloggers; I think it’s safe to say
that the practice of blogging made the current iteration of CCC Online conceivable.

Clearly, CCC Online is not merely your paper copy of the journal.

CCC Online is in many ways still a mirror site, but it’s a mirror that
can be manipulated in a variety of ways, offering our colleagues different
perspectives on the journal’s content, perspectives that are impossible to
duplicate in print. We’ve worked to make the site as productive as possible,
integrating more efficient management of the journal’s content with
opportunities for exploration and invention.

Our aim since the earliest conversations about the site was to imagine CCC
Online as more than a mirror or, at the very least, as a system of variable
mirrorings: What can the online version of the journal do that the print
variety cannot?

I don’t have much more to say about it right now. Read Collin’s
article. Click around CCC Online and continue to let us know what
you think, what you’d like to see. Link to it. Volunteer for writing abstracts (we’re
approaching 51.1…the end of abstracts and the start of abstract-writing).

I’d say useful *and* fun is just about the best compliment we can get. Who needs Netflix when we’ve provided CCC Online, right? Like Collin’s said before, the project will seem more full and the tagging system will be, as a result, richer once we get deeper into the archive–keeping pace with three volumes or years per semester. The really wild fun officially begins once we start writing abstracts for articles that are, sad to say, without them. Really, though, if we keep framng it as fun, the idea is that we might be able to get 100 volunteers to write one abstract each. That’d take us back to the mid 80’s at least.

This reminds me that I need to get CCC Online on the CCE blog. Sorry to have been so remiss–I really am very , very impressed with it. Why don’t you put out a call for volunteers to write abstracts? Perhaps via Techrhet or BloggingSIG or . . .

It’s going to take some time, but with more linking, the new site is likely to float higher in Google rank. It’d be nice to be in the top 20 results for “CCC” one day. And putting out a call might be just the thing we need to do after we get into the thick of writing them ourselves. We should be coming up on the articles without abstracts sometime later this month or in early November.